Tahvanainen Simo
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abi236945Tahvanainen Simo
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abi236945Saimaa University of Applied Sciences
Business Administration, Lappeenranta
Degree Programme in International Business Management
Simo Tahvanainen
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, THE IMPACT
ON CONSUMER SALES IN READY-MIXED
CONCRETE
CASE RUDUS LTD
Master’s Thesis 2012
ABSTRACT
Simo Tahvanainen
Search engine optimization, the impact on consumer sales in ready-mixed
concrete, case Rudus Ltd, 98 pages, 9 appendices
Saimaa University of Applied Sciences, Lappeenranta
Degree Programme in International Business Management
Master of Business Administration
Master´s Thesis 2012
Tutor: Project Director Juha Sorjonen, Saimaa University of Applied Sciences
The purpose of this study was to find out if there is a correlation between search
engine visibility improvement and consumer sales in the ready- mixed concrete
business. The theory part handles the importance of the Internet and e-
marketing activities in general, and is also intended to be a guideline for e-
marketing personnel in Rudus Ltd. Because of the case company’s needs,
search engine marketing is handled more extensively than the research
question requires.
The research part was done by collecting data from various sources and by
comparing the results to find out if there is a correlation between improvements
and sales. The study was a constructive study where the case construction was
Rudus’ Website and the search engine marketing process.
The study was completed in the autumn of 2011. The theory part was written
between September and November of 2011. Rudus’ Website and consumer
sales survey was carried out between April 1st 2011 and November 31st 2011.
This period was compared to the situation between April 1st 2010 and
November 31st 2010. There were no other significant changes in consumer
sales practices between 2010 and 2011. This is an important factor when
judging the relevance of the correlation. Also, Rudus’ e-marketing organization
and practices were handled during the process.
Keywords: Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Search Engine Marketing, SEM,
Concrete
ABBREVIATIONS
CPC Cost per Click
CSS Cascading Style Sheets
DNS Domain Name System
HTML HyperText Mark-up Language
HTTP HyperText Transfer Protocol
IAB Internet Advertising Bureau
KWA Keyword Advertising
PDF Portable Document Format
PPC Pay-Per-Click
RMC Ready-Mixed Concrete
SEM Search Engine Marketing
SEO Search Engine Optimization
URL Unified Resource Locator
XHTML Extensible HyperText Mark-up Language
TERMS
Algorithm Is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-
defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms
are used for calculation, data processing, and automated
reasoning. In simple words an algorithm is a step-by-step
procedure for calculations.
Body copy Body text is the term for the text forming the main content
of a book, magazine, Web page or other printed matter.
HTML element named <body> that serves to delimit the
body matter from the front matter (or in HTML, the <head>)
that contains metadata such as the page title. The
typesetting of the Web page is carried out by document
body elements within this.
Bounce Rate Bounce rate represents the percentage of visitors who
enter the site and "bounce" (leave the site) rather than
continue viewing other pages within the same site.
Bowtie-theory Is a theory that explains sites linking to each other.
Conversion rate The ratio of visitors who convert casual content views or
Website visits into desired actions based on subtle or direct
requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators.
If the prospect has visited a marketer's Website, examples
of conversion actions might include making an online
purchase or submitting a form to request additional
information.
Cookie Is used for an origin Website to send state information to a
user's browser and for the browser to return the state
information to the origin site. The state information can be
used for authentication, identification of a user session,
user's preferences, shopping cart contents, or anything else
that can be accomplished through storing text data on the
user's computer.
Cost Per Click Also called as Pay per Click. An Internet advertising model
used to direct traffic to Websites, where advertisers pay to
the publisher (typically a Website owner) when the ad is
clicked. With search engines, advertisers typically bid on
keyword phrases relevant to their target market. Content
sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than
use a bidding system. PPC "display" advertisements are
shown on Websites with related content that have agreed
to show ads.
Description The description attribute provides a concise explanation of
a Web page's content
Directory A directory on the World Wide Web. It specializes in linking
to other Websites and categorizing those links.
Flash-players Is software for viewing multimedia, Rich Internet
Applications and streaming video and audio, on a computer
Web browser or on supported mobile devices.
HTML Is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags,
enclosed in angle brackets (like <html>), within the Web
page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs
like <h1> and </h1>, although some tags, known as empty
elements, are unpaired, for example <img>. The first tag in
a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they
are also called opening tags and closing tags). In between
these tags Web designers can add text, tags, comments
and other types of text-based content.
HTML mark-up The predominant mark-up language for Web pages. HTML
elements are the basic building-blocks of Web pages.
Iframes Iframes allow a visual HTML Browser window to be split
into segments, each of which can show a different
document. This can lower bandwidth use, as repeating
parts of a layout can be used in one frame, while variable
content is displayed in another.
JavaScrip code JavaScript is a prototype-based scripting language that is
dynamic, weakly typed and has first-class functions. It is a
multi-paradigm language, supporting object-oriented,
imperative, and functional programming styles.
Keywords One of the most commonly used meta elements.
Metadata Data about the containers of data.
Page Also called as Web page. Is a document or information
resource that is suitable for the World Wide Web and can
be accessed through a Web browser and displayed on a
monitor or mobile device. This information is usually in
HTML or XHTML format, and may provide navigation to
other Web pages via hypertext links.
PageRank PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry
Page and used by the Google Internet search engine, that
assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a
hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide
Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative
importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to
any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and
references.
Page View A page view is a request to load a single HTML file (“page”)
of an Internet site. Page views may be counted as part of
web analytics.
Site Also called Website, is a collection of related Web pages
containing images, videos or other digital assets.
Text browser A text-based Web browser is a Web browser that renders
only the text of Web pages, and ignores graphic content.
Usually, they render pages faster than Web browsers that
include graphics because graphics need more bandwidth
than text.
Title tag Title element represents the title of the document. In the
HTML syntax, most elements are written with a start tag
and an end tag, with the content in between. Tags are
composed of the name of the element, surrounded by
angle brackets. An end tag also has a slash after the
opening angle bracket, to distinguish it from the start tag.
CONTENTS
1 INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 8
2 OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE .......................................................................... 11
3 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE INTERNET ..................................................... 13
4 INTERNET MARKETING .............................................................................. 19
4.1 Search Engine Marketing (SEM) ............................................................ 21
4.2 Keyword Advertising (KWA) ................................................................... 23
4.3 Marketing practices ................................................................................ 23
5 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION .............................................................. 25
5.1 General information about the SEO ....................................................... 26
5.2 General information about search engine .............................................. 29
5.3 Consumer behaviour in the Internet ....................................................... 31
5.4 Optimization process .............................................................................. 37
5.5 Structural changes ................................................................................. 42
5.6 Text content ........................................................................................... 43
5.6.1 Head Lines .................................................................................... 44
5.6.2 Body copy ..................................................................................... 46
5.6.3 Links .............................................................................................. 47
5.7 Indexing.................................................................................................. 53
5.8 Follow-Up ............................................................................................... 57
6 EVALUATION................................................................................................ 58
7 SUMMARY .................................................................................................... 59
CHARTS ........................................................................................................... 60
IMAGES ............................................................................................................ 60
FORMULAS ...................................................................................................... 60
REFERENCES ................................................................................................. 61
1 INTRODUCTION
Today, almost any service or product purchase process starts with a Web
search. In fact, 88 % of people start looking for a product or service online
(Tulos.fi, 2011). In Finland, the search tool is almost invariably the Google
search engine. In 2010, 98% of searches were done with Google (Mäkelä,
2011). Rudus Ltd has noticed the significance of search engine growth, but at
the same time has discovered that the Rudus Ltd Website's (www.rudus.fi)
visibility on Google is not good enough. This is a problematic issue since Rudus
Ltd is Finland's market leader in aggregates, crushing and ready-mix concrete,
yet the visibility of its Websites is not on same level.
The purpose of this study is to investigate Rudus Ltd’s Website’s search engine
optimization and search engine marketing impact on Rudus Ltd's consumer
sales in ready-mixed concrete. Rudus Ltd's markets are mainly in Finland for
Finnish customers, so the search engine being dealt with is limited to Google,
which has the dominant position in Finland. The theoretical element will be
dealing with search engine marketing, search engine optimization, related Web
analytics and other tools for online businesses.
After the theoretical element, a closer look will be taken at search engine
marketing and optimization from Rudus Ltd's point of view, following with Rudus
Ltd's ready-mix concrete business review and a closer look at facts that can be
measured in sales comparison. Finally a comparison is done between Rudus
Ltd's ready-mix concrete consumer sales during a selected period of time to
search engine optimization and number of potential customers entering through
Google to Rudus’ Website during the same period. Those figures are then
compared to historical data of sales and visitors before optimization. The
purpose of this thesis is to find out the impact on sales when the company’s
presence in search engines is optimized.
The author of the thesis is working in Rudus Ltd as a Regional Director in the
Northern Finland Unit and is involved in a wide range of development projects
8
concerning Rudus Ltd. One of his main duties is to be part of the Rudus ready-
mix concrete management team. Due to this role he has a good preconception
on Rudus’ current situation in consumer sales and challenges being faced with
the company’s visibility in Google. The subject is interesting and very current.
The results of the study might also be used in other fields of business. Search
engine usage is increasing all the time and there are several companies facing
these same challenges in their reach ability.
Background
Rudus Ltd is a market dominant company on aggregate and ready-mixed
concrete in Finland, but after several brand name changes it has lost the brand
advantage in consumer sales. Rudus Ltd has noticed that its reach ability
through Google is very poor when consumers are searching only through
products, without using the brand name. The biggest problem is that Rudus
doesn’t have any product linkage in their brand name when compared with its
competitors (Ruskon Betoni, Luja Betoni…etc.). This is why the domain doesn’t
have a direct link to product searches. Consumer sales in the Rudus ready-mix
concrete –unit (RMC) means customers that buy concrete for their own needs,
mostly house/cottage builders and farmers.
Rudus Ltd has started in April 2011 a project to maximize their presence in
Google when customers are searching for products from their portfolio. This
study would support that work and would examine thoroughly the impact on
consumer sales when the company’s presence is optimized.
Internet marketing is a fresh, constantly growing and evolving form of
marketing. Internet marketing means banner advertising, search engine
optimization, search engine marketing (SEM), blog marketing and social media
usage in commercial communication (Mäkelä, 2011). Search engine
optimization (SEO) in turn is a form of e-marketing that has evolved around the
Internet search engines. SEO aims to raise the Website to a high and prominent
position in search engine results if possible.
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SEO is one form of SEM, meaning measures to the site that improve site
placement in search results as much as possible. The importance of SEO in
marketing is growing fast simultaneously with consumer e-marketing habits. It
can be called truly directed marketing which doesn’t include any so–called
“useless” contacts like in the more traditional medias.
Search engines are a very versatile channel in the marketing sense.
Consumers are using search engines to compare alternatives, clarify the
problems faced in purchase decisions and find the right place to shop. Studies
show that 50 % of search engine searches are related to purchasing
(Seppänen, 2011). It offers several options for the marketer to pull customers
towards their products and services when allocating their portfolio correctly for
the search engines and search engine users.
More and more people are today looking for product and service information via
the Internet. Hence almost every company has their own Web pages.
Companies have made huge investments for Web pages to fulfil the latest
requirements and to be as user-friendly as possible. Companies are justifying
their Web presence by marketing related reasons. The aim is to sell the
company’s products and services and to make them knowledgeable for the
potential customers. Surprisingly, contrary to conventional marketing rules, the
e-marketing success is still rarely measured. Were the target segments
reached? What was the result of the campaign? SEO is giving answers to these
questions. Site’s SEO-process improves site visibility and it strengthens the link
between company offerings and customer needs. SEO is a continuous
marketing process. The right indicators need to be set in order to measure
success and to continue the development process. Web analytics programs are
tools used to gather information and statistics about the number of visitors and
their activities on the Website. This informs marketers if the customers are
finding the pages and what is the rate of return compared to other marketing
activities. (Paananen, 2006.)
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2 OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE
This study examines what the search engine marketing is about, how well does
it affect the number of Website visitors and does the change correlate with the
change in consumer sales. The study is limited to deal only with search engine
marketing and search engine optimization in the field of Internet marketing. In
the Rudus’ survey part there is also a part from paid directories. (Chart 7.) Other
Internet marketing forms would have been for example banner advertising and
E–mail marketing. Other forms are also interesting and it would be useful for
Rudus to study the benefit of those in some other context. In this study those
are not studied because the topic would have been too broad to handle
successfully.
This work was focused on improving the sites ranking in the search engine that
has the most users and commercial value among the target customers of the
Rudus Ltd’s sites(www.rudus.fi). In other words, Google as Google’s market
share in Finland is overwhelmingly dominant. Google practically owns the
markets and other companies combined have less than 2 percent of the market
share. Search engine markets in Finland are divided as follows: 4/2010 –
4/2011.
• Google, 98,11 %
• Bing, 1,45 %
• Yahoo!, 0,25 %
• Ask Jeeves, 0,06 %
• AltaVista, 0,04 %
• Muut, 0,09 %.
(Mäkelä, 2011)
This work handles only Rudus RMC’s consumer sales in Finland, so the search
engine is limited to Google. In Finland, SEO is already commonly called
“Google optimization”. SEO has an impact on all search engines even though it
would primarily have been targeted to Google. Web pages will reach good
positions in other search engines as well. For example the Microsoft owned
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search engine, Bing, gives value to many of the same things as Google.
(Mäkelä, 2011)
Internet site visibility can also be raised with several other optimization /
marketing methods, such as increasing the company’s visibility in social media
like Facebook, Twitter, Google + or YouTube. Google also appreciates blogs or
use of Google’s map service. These themes will not be handled in this study.
This research will be made in co-operation with Rudus and it is made by
examining the results of search engine usage and user behaviour in Rudus
home pages. Rudus home page usage is examined before the optimizing work
and after the work is in progress. The consumer sales during the same period
are summed up and the results are compared.
Research method in this thesis is constructive research, i.e. applied research
methodologies, and it is structured as a study type work where the subscriber
company, Rudus, has an important role. Constructive research includes for
example device ,system ,principle, etc… designing and evaluation(Seppänen,
2004). In Rudus case, the construction under investigation is their Website and
the process of search engine marketing. The thesis includes also a correlation
comparison between Website visitor amounts and consumer sales.
Search engine marketing is still young as a discipline. Itt has been around since
1997 , hence there is not much published literature available. Source material
includes some published literature, but is focused on Web publications, as well
as Master’s and Bachelor’s degree thesis studies.
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3 THE IMPORTANCE OF THE INTERNET
Today, almost every field of business has a presence in the Internet through the
company’s own Web pages and different sorts of advertising forms. The amount
of information on the Internet has grown exponentially. Number of sites in the
Internet in 1996 -2010 is presented in chart 1 (Netcraft, 2010).
Chart 1. Number of hostnames in the Internet in 1996 -2010 (Netcraft, 2010)
It appears from Chart 1. that the abandoned Web pages number has remained
about half of the active sites number since recording was started in 2000. At the
same time, as the amount of information on the Internet has increased, so has
the use of Internet. Chart 2 presents the prevalence of Internet usage in
percents of different age groups in Finland in 2009. All of the information on the
Internet has been brought to consumers by separate search engines. Finns
make daily millions of searches with Google’s search engine and over half of
the people use search engines always when using the Internet (Paananen,
2006). The Internet’s superior role as an information channel has been a
foregone conclusion for a long time, but in recent years the digital marketing,
made in the Internet, has gained shares when compared to traditional marketing
channels.
13
Chart 2. Internet usage in different age groups in Finland (Tilastokeskus, 2010)
In chart 3. is presented comparison research about the number of leads from
marketing in different marketing channels.
”On Demand Marketing: As compared to interruptive nature of advertisement on
TV and other medias, where ad is shown to even those people who don't want
to see, Internet provides On-Demand Information. People search on net for
what they want and when they want it. There is low cost and high return on
investments. It is one hundred times cheaper than conventional marketing tools
like TV or newspaper advertisements. Just compare the cost of printing a full
newspaper Ad for one Day vs. the cost of e-mailing to 25,000 e-mail addresses.
Internet is clearly the winner. (Wisdomtalks, 2010.)
Newspaper &
Online Marketing TV Radio
Magazine
Amount Invested($) 10,000 50,000 10,000 20,000
Leads(Avg.) 700 - 800 500 - 600 200 - 300 300 - 400
Chart 3. Comparative research of leads from advertisement in different Medias.
(Wisdomtalks, 2010.)
In the United Kingdom, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) is reporting that
online advertising has overtaken television. According to Reuters, advertising
14
spent on the Internet grew 4.6 % to a total of 23.5 % of the total
market(Wisdomtalks, 2010).
Chart 4. Use of Information Technology in Finnish companies in 2010
(Tilastokeskus, 2010)
Finnish companies have also discovered the importance of Internet visibility for
business. The number of homepages has been growing steadily and the
Finnish Statistics Office report that 87 percent (Chart 4) of all companies in
Finland have their own Website.(Tilastokeskus, 2010.)
According to Finnish Statistics Office, 87 % of all companies employing at least
10 persons had their own Web pages in spring 2010 (Chart 4). The prevalence
15
of Web pages is increasing the bigger the company is. Of larger companies
(+100 employees), 98 % have Web pages but in smaller companies (10 -19
employees) Web pages can only be found from 81 % of the companies.
When examined by the industry it is noticeable that Web pages were most
frequently used in information and communications sector(Chart 4). The next
highest industries were the professional and scientific activities, wholesale and
industrial companies with more than 90 per cent of companies having Web
pages. Most sparsely Web pages were used in logistics (71 %) and construction
(76 %) industries. The online shopping possibility in their homepages was in 15
% of companies (Chart 5). Value of online shopping dropped from the year
2009, but the share maintained the same 6.1 %. Most of online shopping is
business to business shopping, and in 2010 81 % was in this category.
(Tilastokeskus, 2010.)
Home pages were commonly used for product marketing. In companies with
less than 10 employees, 87 % used them for this purpose (Chart 5). Product
catalogues or price lists were found from 38 % of all Web pages and anonline
shopping possibility was offered in 17 % of the companies sites.
Chart 5. Homepage use in Finnish companies in 2010 (Tilastokeskus, 2010)
16
Marketing investments used in digital marketing have grown steadily over the
last few years. Average company’s digital marketing budget will be almost 30 %
of the total marketing budget in 2012, says Aalto University’s research (Chart
6).
Chart 6. Digital marketing budget from the total marketing budget (DIVIA, 2011)
The importance of search engines
Search engines are Websites that allow users to search for information by using
different types of searching keywords. Keywords help the search engine to
create a list of sites that contain information related to searched words. There is
a high capacity demanding and complex system behind this simple action.
Search engines can be divided broadly into three essential elements; data
collection, database, and user queries processing.
There are thousands of different search engines in the world. The most well
known of these is Google, even though it is not as popular everywhere as it is in
Finland. The most popular search engine in Russia is Yandex, and Baidu is
used in China. Google in considered to be fast, accurate and informative as well
as the most comprehensive search engine on the Internet. Google’s advantage
in Finland is also its ability to apply Finnish Web pages exceptionally well.
17
Google offers also separate images, videos, discussion groups, map and
scientific knowledge specialized searches. (POHTO, 2009.)
Approximately 400 million Web searches are performed every day and that
means that every single second there are more than 4500 searches (Enge et al.
2009). This requires automated and super efficient systems from leading search
engine companies.
Search engines are based on an automated system that indexes and organizes
separate Websites in the Internet. Search result produced by search engine is a
list of the suitable results matching the keywords. A single Web page’s rank is
based on the detailed search terms’ frequency, proximity, phrases, etc.
matching the searched words. The technology used and the quality of links are
affecting the result alongside content-related factors.
Today, 88 % of the people start product or service searches from the Internet. It
is worth noting that the power in services and products marketing has shifted
from companies to consumers. “It’s not what you say for your company
anymore. It’s what they say about you.” (Seppänen, 2011.)
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4 INTERNET MARKETING
Internet marketing refers to all the marketing tasks made in the Internet.
Originally the term included only banner advertising, but based on Mäkelä it
also consists of e-mail advertising, search advertising, search engine
optimization, the use of electronic directories, blog marketing and social media
usage as a message channel.
The roots of Internet marketing are in the early 90s, when the activity was
mainly limited to text-based product lists and product presentations. Later
development went through graphical ads to customer service, sales and
stakeholder management (Paananen, 2006). The Internet has become a viable
place to trade or do business. It has taken its place among traditional media
marketing channels.
Internet marketing and its sections are presented in Chart 7. Search engine
optimization (SEO) and Keyword advertising (KWA) are therefore part of the
search engine marketing (SEM). The ultimate goal is the same in both of
measures, to bring visibility in search engines. In SEO it is done by raising the
classification and bringing the site up in so-called organic search results. In
KWA the visibility is applied through paid and sponsored links. Usually paid
results appear separately from the real search results and the ranking is based
on offers given to separate search words/ phrases. Both activities are
supporting each other for example by including a keyword-analysis. SEO is also
linked to paid directories. Paid directories are link collections, into which
companies can add themselves to get more visibility for their contact
information in the Internet. These directories are often treated seriously and
they are well valued in the business world. Therefore the rating of those is also
high and links from directories increase Web page’s rating considerably.
(Paananen, 2006.)
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Internet
marketing
paid banner e-mail
directories marketing marketing SEM
SEO KWA
Chart 7.Internet Marketing (Paananen, 2006)
There has been significant growth in social media, e-newsletters and
community usage in recent years. The most popular forms of e-marketing in
2011 were company’s own Website, search engine marketing, direct e-mail,
electronic newsletters and online advertising. The share of usage increased
from the previous years in all marketing types. Results are presented in Chart 8.
However, POHTO’s study shows a clear distribution to large and small
companies. Smaller companies do not take advantage of the Internet even
though previously it has been assumed digital channels to be an excellent
marketing channel for smaller and more agile companies. (POHTO, 2009,
Reponen, 2009.)
Chart 8. How actively companies use digital Marketing channels?
0= Not at all, 5= All the time, (DIVIA, 2011)
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Online advertising has developed by leaps and bounds since the first banner
ads were displayed. In the last 15 years online advertising has developed faster
than any other marketing form, mostly because of Internet’s and its users’
progress. Today there are several new media types in use in addition to those
that have already been mentioned, for example multimedia display advertising
and streaming advertising (Google, 2011). Simultaneously, when marketing
opportunities have grown, the companies have organized their digital marketing
utilization. Divia’s research participants (310 Finnish marketing professionals)
related that in 2011, already 41 % of their digital marketing investments were
budgeted (Chart 9). (Divia, 2011.)
Chart 9. Is Digital Marketing spending budgeted? (Divia, 2011)
4.1 Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Search engine marketing is divided into search engine optimization and paid
keyword advertising(Chart 7). As mentioned in chapter 4, the visibility in KEA is
applied through paid and sponsored links. Image 1 shows that paid results
appear separately from the organic search results. The pricing in keyword
advertising is based on the number of clicks the ad gets (Reponen, 2009,
Seppänen 2011). SEO influences on search engines’ organic results visibility
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and paid KWA gives visibility in Google’s advertisement sections. Organic
results are also shown in Image 1.
In Finland the digital marketing industry is still quite small and activities of
qualified expertise are not yet widely available. On a general level, it can be
said that currently the financial stakes are higher in KWA even though the traffic
is much higher on the organic side of the result (Image 4) (Liuhto, 2010). SEM
is usually started with KWA, because it is faster and easier than SEO.
Paid
Organic
Image 1. Paid and organic results in search engine.
There are easy tools for advertisers to guide keyword advertising themselves.
For example in Google’s AdWords, advertisers select keywords that describe
their company or products. When users search in Google by using keywords,
word-related ads are displayed among the search results. Ads in Google are
priced by an auction basis which takes place every time when the user types a
search query. Advertisers pay only when users click their ad and the system
ensures that cost is the minimum necessary to maintain their position.
Advertisers can also track the results of their campaigns immediately. The
Google Analytics tool provides for advertisers compound measurements of how
users find their way to advertiser sites, what they do in the site, do they shop or
became a member, and where do they proceed once they leave the site. This
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information enables the marketers to experiment and continuously improve their
campaigns. They can try different keywords, ad-text, follow the value of
keywords and test the efficiency of different front-page layouts. When
advertisers are familiar with customer behaviour and trends, it is possible to
optimize the path from search to sales. The goal is to optimize the path so that
advertisers reach their customers and meet their needs, to find new customers
and to improve the return on their investment. (Google, 2011.)
4.2 Keyword Advertising (KWA)
Keyword Advertising means practically paid visibility alongside with organic
results (Chart 7). It is also called Pay Per Click advertising (PPC). The Price is
based on auction, for example 0,30€/click and customer pays to Google only
when the ad is clicked. This type of marketing is very well targeted and cost
effective reaching only the interested customers. Google ranks ads by quality
points. That means the machine compares the search phrase and the
equivalence of the site and presents the results matching the search most
relevantly. To prevent abuses and for competitive reasons, Google is not
giving their indexing publicly, but the assumed structure is handled more
detailed in the following chapters.
This is how Google is presenting its services to advertisers:
The AdWords system works best for everybody; advertisers, users, publishers
and Google too when the ads we display match our users' needs as closely as
possible. We call this idea 'relevance'.” “We measure relevance in a simple
way: Typically, the higher an ad's Quality Score, the more relevant it is for the
keywords to which it is tied. When your ads are highly relevant, they tend to
earn more clicks, move higher in Ad rank and bring you the most
success.(Google, 2011.)
4.3 Marketing practices
The keyword advertising process begins with key words and phrases definition.
Key words and definitions are intended to help searchers to find the site. The
determination should be done carefully and it is good to remember that if the
keywords are used in advertising campaigns, those words should also be found
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from the campaign site. Keywords definition process is also made in search
engine optimization process and it is dealt with in more detail in chapter 5.4.1.
Next step is to determine the content in sponsored link, to plan the
measurement practices and to set the daily budget for advertisements. The
value of keyword ad is defined based on supply and demand. The more there
are auction participants for a word/phrase, the higher the price is. The price is
presented as the highest price the advertiser is willing to pay for a click.
The rank of an ad consists of auction price and quality points. In other words the
higher the score in the target site the less is needed to pay from ad’s visibility.
On the other hand, if your site doesn’t have good quality points the ad doesn’t
show no matter how much you pay.
Here are few general conclusions:
• The price of one click is usually about 0.10-0.90 €, depending on the
industry in which the advertising is carried out.
• The best visibility related to investment is to get big clicking traffic with
a small click price and high daily budget.
• When the clicking traffic is small, it is important to have a click price
that wins the auction.
• If the ad is not clicked five times in the last thousand times when it is
presented, it is completely eliminated from the circulation. (Seppänen,
2011.)
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5 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION
Search engine optimization means modifying a Website to a format so that the
search engines classify the site as well as possible. Ranking is a value into
which the search engine bases its result display order. The goal is to get your
site to be located at the top of the organic search results in all site-relevant
keywords. In practice, SEO is trying to make Website search engines friendly by
editing the HTML mark-up and text content to match better the user searches.
The aim is to modify the site structure and content so that search engines
appreciate your site more than other sites with same keywords and search
phrases. All search engines have their own algorithms into which the engine
bases its results. (Reponen, 2009.)
Why is search engine optimization done?
• Effectiveness of SEO is easy to measure. It is inexpensive and its effects
are long-term because the SEO makes the entire Website systematically
search engine friendly.
• In customers’ eyes, you exist only if you can be found from Google.
Google’s list is a sort of “ranking list” in viewers’ eyes.
• You are there for the customer always at the right time
• SEO pursues new customers, increased sales, and maximization of
contacts.
• The aim can also be dissemination of information, creating a stronger
brand and revenue of advertising growth (in cases when site gets
revenues from advertisers!). (Seppänen, 2011.)
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5.1 General information about the SEO
SEO has a crucial role in Internet Marketing. SEO is next important after
Website functionality and usability. It has a direct link to KWA and its cost
effectiveness. Effective SEO means search engine friendly Website technology,
quality of content and accuracy of linked pages. Of course, there also needs to
be sufficient high quality traffic.
The aspects mentioned above are all part of Google’s indexing factors. Factors
determine search results and there are more than 200 of those. One of the
most important site quality measuring factors is Google PageRank. PageRank
is Google’s patented algorithm, which analyzes more than 500 million
parameters out of 2 billion mathematical terms.. In practice PageRank means
sites importance in search engine’s view. PageRank grows from every link that
leads to the site, especially if the linking site has high PageRank. It is also
affected by the content, structure of the site and site’s internal linking.
PageRank’s figure is between 0-10 and it gives a good picture of the Website’s
quality. Finnish Websites’ PageRanks are normally 1-4, but can also be higher
like Kela’s sites, 8. (Mäkelä, 2008.)
Image 2. PageRank, The bigger the ball the better the rank,
(Wikipedia, 2011)
This value shouldn’t however be stared at aimlessly, because Google updates it
only a few times a year and it is just one of the about 200 factors that defines
the search result. In Chart 10 is SEOMOZ’s researches estimation of the
sections affecting to Google ranking.
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Chart 10. Component’s of Google’s ranking algorithm Seomoz, 2009)
Here are results of leading SEO professionals’ determination about most
important ranking factors:
• Keyword use in a title tag
• Anchor text of inbound link
• Global link authority of the site
• Age of the site
• Link popularity within the site’s internal link structure
• Topical relevance of inbound links
• Link popularity of the site in topical community
• Keyword use in topical community
• Keyword use in body text
• Global link popularity of the sites that link to the site
(Enge et.al. 2009.)
SEO is often based more on empirical than theoretical research because the
search engines update their algorithm several times during the week and do not
tell about changes or algorithms’ direct structure to the public. The change and
update density of the Google algorithms has been estimated to be about 10
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times a week (Reponen, 2009). Although the algorithm changes happen at a
frequent pace , the basis of SEO work is still the same, and by going through all
basic phases of SEO, search engines will respect the site better in their
classification. No matter how the algorithm changed during the last week.
In Finland search engine optimization can also be perceived as Google
optimization due Google’s dominant market position. However, SEO has a
positive impact on all search engines even though it would have primarily been
targeted just for Google. For example the Microsoft owned search engine, Bing,
appreciates many of the same things as Google. (Mäkelä, 2011.)
History of SEO
SEO is considered to be invented in 1997, when search engine specialists
Danny Sullivan and Bruce Clay started to produce public reports on the subject.
The first publications dealt with search engine algorithms and how different
search engines organized their search results. Marketers and Website
administrators were inspired to think how they might increase their ranking in
results after reading those reports.
In 1998, Google was founded and caused a change in search engine marketing
field. Google’s founders were American Stanford University students Larry Page
and Sergey Brin. They got an idea of a search engine, which is still Google’s
mission "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible
and useful." Google’s early years popularity secret was in its unique algorithm.
Page and Brin had experience of academic research environments and they
believed that to be the key to search engines as well. They thought that the best
solution would be to index the entire network to database and to analyze who is
linking to whom. The idea came from the practice of the academic world, where
scientists will increase their own researches’ confidence by quoting parts from
earlier researches. Google’s algorithm is still based on Page’s and Brin’s basic
idea. A Website into which is linked most links from other high definition pages
is a relevant page itself. This algorithm is called PageRank which was handled
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more precisely in last chapter. Today, the algorithm Google uses is much more
complicated than the early years’ version. (Reponen, 2009.)
5.2 General information about search engine
Search engines are dependent on the information retrieval science concept that
was developed in the 1950s. When developing first search systems scientists
discovered two elements, relevance and popularity, enabling a large part of
data retrieval functionality. The relevance of document increases
simultaneously when searchers chosen keywords amount increases in
documents text content. The more a specific term or phrase is mentioned in a
document, the more important it is. The significance grows if the searched key
term is an important part of the structure of the document like the main or sub
title. Document’s popularity on the other hand reflects the relative importance.
The popularity is measured by the amount of citations from the original
document. Today search engines have applied the concept of relevance and
popularity to the new format, to document-analysis and link-analysis. In
document-analysis the site is considered through the information it contains and
term relevancy is interpreted through their locations. Most important locations
from search engines point of view are the title, meta-data, tags and body text.
Link-analysis is measuring the amount of primarily links from external sites, but
also the relevance of the linking sites. Other factors are age of the linking site
and the linking pages reliability. (Reponen, 2009.)
Such search engines consist of three parts, the search robot, site database and
results displaying application. Search engines perform several processes before
results are presented to the user. Search robot’s task is to browse through the
pages in the Internet and add them to a database or index base. Search robots
behave very much like a standard Web browser, but the robot sees the page
only like a text browser. Search robot asks for Web pages from the Web server,
downloads the page and saves it to the directory. In the third part, the results
displaying application looks for corresponding sites from the index and displays
the results in order of classification. From SEO point of view the most
interesting parts are robots and result displayer. (Paananen, 2006.)
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Google’s search robot, Googlebot, follows Internets hyperlinks when moving to
another site. Instead of page appearance, the Googlebot examines only the
structure of the site, content, and external factors such as linking. New sites
administrator can add network address to Google’s service in order to make
sure that page can be found from the site directory. Another possibility to get a
page to Google’s directory is to wait that Googlebot finds its way to the page
through external link. Most of the pages in directory have ended there when
Googlebot has found them through external links. Googlebot will save the copy
of the sites content to the directory. When the directory includes a copy of all
Web pages Googlebot has found, it is instantaneous to present the results after
search. When user performs a search the query process looks through the
pages that include searched words and organizes search results to hierarchy.
(Reponen, 2009.)
Google’s mission is to organize the world‘s information and make it universally
accessible and useful. Beginning in 1996, Stanford University graduate
students Larry Page and Sergey Brin built a search engine called “BackRub”
that used links to determine the importance of individual Web pages. By 1998
they had formalized their work, creating the company you know today as
Google. Since then, Google has grown by leaps and bounds. From offering
search in a single language it offers today dozens of products and services,
including various forms of advertising and Web applications for all kinds of
tasks, in scores of languages. Starting from two computer science students in a
university dorm room, they now have thousands of employees and offices
around the world. (Google, 2011.) Google was named after word “googol”,
which means mathematical term for a number that starts with 1 and followed by
100 times 0. The name reflects the enormous amount of existing information
and Google’s mission to organize all that information.
Daily, about 72 % of Finnish Internet users use Google search engine. Another
fact that tells about Google’s popularity in Finland is that 77 % of Google users
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are using Google searches before important purchasing decisions. (Reponen,
2009.)
5.3 Consumer behaviour in the Internet
According to Paananen 2006, Internet is in crucial role in people’s consumption
decision- making process, and more than 90 percent of companies use Internet
when making business to business purchasing decisions. Internet and search
engines have therefore became an important factor in the purchase decision-
making process. It is also an important factor on consumer behaviour.
Comparing to traditional advertising, instructions, and salespersons memory
and professional skills, the Internet provides unlimited data around the clock.
What is exceptional in the Internet is its interactivity, which needs to be taken
into account when making research from the consumer behaviour point of view.
Search situations can be roughly divided into three main categories: Navigation
searches (10 %), information search (80 %) and trade-oriented searches (10
%). (Tulos.fi, 2011.)
Navigation searches means searches which aim to find a particular site. Such a
site can be for example a company’s site or a certain site where the searcher
has already visited. SEM doesn’t have much influence on these searchers
because they know exactly what they want. Search engine marketers however
need to take this group into account and to make sure that their sites can be
discovered from the main search engines. Even though there is not much
potential in navigation searches, they need to be taken account due to their
large share.
Information seekers are searching for information about a particular topic. The
difference to navigation is the fact that information seekers believe there is
information about the topic, but they don’t know where. Searchers often start
with very general terms and then refine the terms to cut the irrelevant results.
Information searches are most important searches from SEM point of view. In
this phase the customer has normally identified the need and is looking for a
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solution to fulfil it. By providing clear information-rich sites with proper keywords
and optimization, these searchers can be contacted.
In the last group there are searchers who are no longer searching for
information, but want to buy the product, download the file, join the mailing list
or do something else comparable. From the SEM point of view they are tough
customers who know what they want and use search phrases with exact
product information. The problem areas are in descriptions and search engine
results. By creating good descriptions for the product-lists and by bringing
special offers and other sales increasing aspects to search engines will help to
get better results. (Paananen, 2006.)
Internet browser software vendors attempt to combine the address bar and the
search box. This development will run the users to a new habit. This is a
sufficient action to write the brand or product name to the address bar. Then
Google will show the desired page in their result page. This helps the users
when they don’t have to remember entire addresses. On the other hand this
development makes the search engine position even more powerful. (Reponen,
2009.)
Only a minor group of searchers look for results from other pages than the first
one (Chart 11). Only the three first positions get everyone’s attention. So, SEO
is actually visibility management. (Eisenberg, 2008.)
An eye tracking specialized Research Company, Thinkeyetracking, has done
research about Google users eye tracking habits in 2005 and in 2008. The
results are presented in Image 3 and they show that in 2005 persons tracked
the whole first page before they decided to click the link. Within the next three
years, either Google had become much better at showing what the viewer
wanted to see or using Google had become a habit since the user found that
results are relevant and right answers were found from the first results. The
study participants were asked what would they do if the required information
can’t be found from the first page. Out of the respondents 87 % told they would
modify the search term. In Chitika’s research from 2010, this figure seems to be
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already 98 % (Chart 11). This is clear evidence that only first page matters, and
actually it is crucial to be in the top three. (Eisenberg, 2008.)
Image 3. Eye tracking comparison from consumers behaviour in 2005 and 2008
(Eisenberg, 2008)
In chart 11 is presented Chitika Network’s research about traffic from different
search result positions. For traffic that goes through Google, the 4th position
gets only 7,7 % of entries. That is almost 5 times less than traffic in position 1.
Chart 11. Percent of traffic by Google result (Based on a sample of 8,253,240
impressions across the Chitika network)(Ruby, 2010)
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Consumer attitudes towards advertisement on search engines have also been
researched. Average numbers of advertisement performance are as follows:
90 % of the clicks are made to organic results and 10 % to paid ads (Image 4).
Also, an eye tracking observation map reveals the low proportion of the search
results (Image 5).
10% of clicks
90% of clicks
Image 4. Ad clicking popularity vs. organic search results (Seppänen, 2011)
Image 5. Eye scanning, ad vs. organic results (Waraas, 2008)
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The first positions in search results are collecting the most clicks and for that
reason the cost for those positions is higher. The price determination for paid
results was handled in Chapter 4.3.
Today, Google presents also other search related media among organic text
format results. This media includes news, images, maps, blogs, videos, etc.
Clicking percents for these are higher than paid advertising clicking percents. In
Image 6 is presented that 31 % of the viewers are clicking images with 17 % for
videos and 36 % for other expanded search results. Google owns YouTube and
therefore it is assumed that it favours the search results that match with
YouTube videos. (Seppänen, 2011.)
31 % of search
engine users
click news in
blended search
31 % of search engine results.
users click images in
blended search results.
17 % of search engine
users click videos in
blended search results.
Image 6. Popularity of other search relating media (Seppänen, 2011)
It is important to monitor visitor behaviour on your site. Search engine users
leave valuable information about themselves when searching or visiting
Websites. To choose the visitor tracking system and to set its objectives is the
prerequisite to reach results with Internet marketing. Intended Web analytics
tools are available for a variety of purposes, but mainly in Finland the ones
needed are the free Google services or some more precise Web analytic tools
like Snoobi. Google’s Web master tools are used in definition and development
of site. Tools are primarily used in order to affect on search queries placement
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and search robot rights. Tools show which individual pages Google has
indexed, which search terms have brought users to pages and with which
keywords Google is ranking the page. Most advanced visitor tracking software
have the ability to detect the visitors IP-address and by analyzing that is able to
find out decision makers from the visitor’s organization. Snoobi is a Finnish
visitor tracking software with Web analytic tools and by using it the company
can measure the real advantage of its Website usage and other Internet
activities. Visitor tracking services allow marketers to choose the right
promotional tools as well as to analyze and optimize existing Web pages.
Rudus’ pages visitor tracking parts in this work are done with Snoobi.
In practice, JavaScrip code is downloaded to the followed Web page. It
connects analytic software and downloads tracking information about visitors.
An increase in visitors doesn’t necessarily mean a SEO process. The goal
should always be to increase the sales and attract only potential customers to
the site. With analytic software it is possible to track visit duration, entry
pathways and use of search keywords among visitor numbers. When tracking
e-commercial activities it is possible to find the point where users most likely
suspend the purchasing process. This helps to improve sites so that the
purchasing process would become finalized more often. One interesting statistic
from analytic software is a bounce rate. The Bounce rate tells the number of
visitors leaving the page immediately after entering the site. Normally this tells
that the visitor notices immediately that this is not the page they were looking
for. This is a very important figure and it tells immediately if the site is not
optimized with relevant search terms. (Reponen, 2009.)
It is important to remember that it is not enough to just have a visitor tracking
system. The obtained information needs to be interpreted correctly and actions
should be taken on the site based on visitor behaviour. This is very important
especially in sites whose revenue model is based on advertisement or e-
commerce.
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5.4 Optimization process
The SEO optimization process, based on Paananen, is presented in Chart 12.
In practice this means the process by which the site is edited so that the
classification of the page is as high as possible and it can be found with desired
keywords.
The process starts from a baseline survey where the current situation and
improvement demanding areas will be clarified. Keyword analysis is made after
baseline survey. The goal is to find out the words that match with most used
products or services. After analysis comes the site optimization part which is
divided into technical and content parts. In the technical part, possible visibility
problems due to server settings are fixed. Also other nonstandard methods of
implementation and other issues that interfere with search robots like flash-
players, videos and photos are fixed. In the content part, sites are modified to
match search engines and user needs concerning the appearance, keyword
frequency, how well keywords can be found from the URL, page title, headings
and other important HTML-elements and server response times (Image 10).
Mainly in this part the focus is on text content modification to match keywords.
When the site itself is in order it is time to perform link analysis. In link analysis
the site is linked to other industry-related directories. Directories can either be
free or paid directories and there can also be public directories. After linking, the
site is ready for indexing. It needs to be added for search engines indexing list
and tracking set up. Because of the rapidly changing environment in the Internet
the optimization process is an iterative process, and the work needs to be
started again from the beginning to get the site even more optimized.
(Paananen, 2006.)
status keyword website link indexing Follow-
survey analysis optimizat analysis up
ion.
Chart 12. Optimization process (Paananen, 2006)
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According to Tulos Helsinki, the importance of optimization work is divided as
follows: Background work
meaning keyword-definition,
competitors sites scouting, own BACKGROUND CONTENTS
WORK Meta-discription
sites current state analysis and Keywords Page Title
Google tools use is ca. 50 % Competitors Headings
Own site 25 %
(Image 7). Body text and linking Google tools
is ca. 25 % and the last quarter Body text
50 % Linking
goes for Meta description and 25 %
headings.
Image 7. Optimization process inputs
distribution (Tulos Helsinki, 2011)
There are several ways to start the process, but one good way to start is by
checking that the robots are visiting the site and finding all the pages. The
inspection can be performed by searching for search robot traces from the
server log files or by searching pages directly with search engines. If the robot
has not visited the page it can be reported to search engines and the robot will
inspect the site in few days. Most sites will be indexed automatically and if your
site is not indexed it is worth checking so into the cause. There can be
obstacles for robots like non-standard methods in implementation or something
in the content that the robot can’t read.
When the site is indexed for the first time the actual optimization process can
start.
Keyword analysis
According to Ben Norman, ” The most important part of optimizing your Website
is the selection and implementation of your keywords. If you don’t get this part
of the optimization process right then everything else you do will be in vain.
Target the right keywords and your Website will be a success; target the wrong
keywords and you will miss out the valuable traffic you are trying to canvas”.
(Norman, 2009.)
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Optimization work should start with keyword analysis. Analysis should find out
the keywords in company’s business. The keywords are the ones which would
be important to rank high in search results and which customers are actually
using when performing searches. When analyzing, it is good to remember the
facts from Chart 14; only one word is rarely enough, and 2-4 is better. It is also
good to notice that misspelled searches may be good opportunities to guide the
searcher to your own site cheaply. The source for analysis can be for example
company’s product groups and service descriptions services that keep statistics
of keywords in the Internet. Generally the company’s personnel are the most
qualified group to list keywords, but it also is important to get proposals from
potential customer as well. External persons often can see the subject from a
broader perspective, therefore their keywords are somewhat different from the
company’s own.
There are several methods to find out the right keywords. Those can be a result
of traditional brainstorming session or produced by premium search tools like
WordTracker that tells what terms are most prevalent in your business field.
Keyword analyzing is often an underestimated process and it is often gone
through too quickly. People think that we know what words searchers are using
or that it is enough if the site can be found with the product name. Normally in
these cases the customer already knows what he is looking for. (Paananen,
2006.)
Keywords can be roughly divided into head- and long tail –terms. For example,
“truck”, is a head-term and “used yellow concrete truck” is a long-tail term
(Image 8). Short, one-word terms collect most of the traffic through search
engines, but the competition is harder and the customer who arrives at the site
with a short term doesn’t necessarily have the same purchasing potential as the
one using longer and more precise terms. Searchers who used the search word
”truck” would most likely see lot of relevant results in the result page, but if he
has a clear target to purchase a used concrete truck, he would most likely use
more precise search terms. When the right words are found, those are added to
content, link- texts, and headlines.
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As Chart 13 shows, the long term searches were increasing their share strongly
in 2007-2009 but it seems that the development has slowed down or stopped in
2010-2011. Nevertheless, it is not enough to optimize the main terms only. The
site’s text content should support the increasing number of search words,
because potential customers can discover the sites with surprising
combinations of keywords.
“People will find you through the oddest combination of keywords. Most of
these words seem nonsensical till you understand that people looking for your
products and services do not always know the correct terminology or industry
jargon to accurately describe what they need”. (Kate Russell, 2010.)
There is much less competition in long-tail searches than short ones (Image 8).
That makes long terms cheaper and the customers entering the site with long
terms have much higher purchasing potential than customers entering with the
short ones. Long terms should be considered especially when product
keywords are thought. Image 8 shows how the short and long term affects the
competition situation and costs.
Key phrase curve
High cost &
competition
1 word phrase
"truck" LONG
LONG TAILTAIL
SEO SEO
Number of results
2 words phrase
"concrete truck"
More descriptive phrase
"used yellow concrete truck"
Low cost &
competition
More generic More specific
Competition
Image 8. Long tail SEO.
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Chart 13. U.S. keyword breakdown by percentage of clicks. Data is based on all
search engines on a four week rolling period from the Experian Hitwise sample
of 10 million US Internet users. (Experian Hitwise, 2011)
Conversion rate tells the ratio of visitors reaching the goal that is set for the site.
It can be calculated as shown in formula 1.0. The goal can be for example, e-
commerce purchase action or contact. Chart 14 tells what is the average
conversion rate by keyword phrase length. The Chart shows that the best
conversion is obtained with three and four word phrases.
( 1.0)
Chart 14. Conversion Rate by keyword phrase length (Baggott, 2010)
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It can be challenging to define keywords for long tail-searches. However,
successful SEO makes the entire Website systematically search engine
friendly, and even the unexpected search phrases might still give good
positions. It is all up to relevant information matching the keywords. Successful
long-tail keywords direct the user to the right site. It is good to remember the
potential behind long tails. They are cheaper than short ones (Image 8) and the
conversion rate is much better (Chart 14), but still they are not that much less
used among searchers (Chart 13).
5.5 Structural changes
In practice, structural changes means changes to issues that the crawler robot
reads, but a normal user would not take into account. Changes are made to the
platform of the Website, headlines, meta data and site structures. The above-
mentioned facts have to be in order and correspond to the content in order to
get a good indexing result. The robot interprets the site according to above-
mentioned issues. Even if the content would match with the search, the robot
would interpret it incorrectly and leave the page away from search results. This
is exactly the problem in Rudus’ case, and is why this project was started in the
first place.
The structure of a Website is described with the HTML mark-up language and
search engines respect keywords in some parts of the site structure more than
in others. A Website should always match the standard. Starting point can be
that it needs at least to follow the XHTML 1.0 specification, which enables
platform independence for the used Web browser. The network address
(domain address) should include a keyword or several keywords if it is possible.
Also the age and suffix of Web address should be taken into account. The
longer the domain has existed, the more search engines appreciate it. Search
engines and users prefer a local suffix. In Finland that is the “.fi” suffix.
(Reponen, 2009.)
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Network addresses, as well as file names should contain keywords. For
example the imagined concrete e-commerce site’s “valupörssi’s” address
http://www.valuporssi/sivu1.html does not offer any significant keywords for the
search engine. Moreover searchers won’t get any tips about the site’s content
from the word “sivu1”. In general, the use of hyphens has been found to be the
way to separate words from each other in addresses. Based on Reponen’s
study in 2009, this is a sample address http://www.valuporssi.fi/lattiabetonit/.
Many content management systems will shape addresses to search engine-
friendly mode. For example to a shape like: http://www.valuporssi.fi/tuotteet
/betonit/rudus/, when the keywords are ”betonit” and ”rudus”. On the other hand,
the word “tuotteet” could be left out completely, even if it would be one of the
sub-pages in site’s structure. Often the address is not search engine optimized
if there is no content management system in use. A poorly implemented
address is for example the following address: http://www.valuporssi.fi/index.php
?sivu=tuotteet&alasivu=betonit&yritys=rudus, The example address is too long,
uncertain, and includes unnecessary parameters from search engine and user
points of view.
Search engine friendly address is :
www.valuporssi.fi/betonit/rudus/
one-peace shallow directory keyword in
domain structure with page- name
relevant words
Non search engine friendly could for example be:
Xyz3.valuporssi.fi/a/?q=31z&mg=vv7z&sd=8020=cC8
Image 9. Search engine friendly site address (Seppänen, 2011)
5.6 Text content
Text content means site’s content that visitors can read and see. After well
made technical optimization, the old content is easy to edit to optimized form.
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Content optimization refers to site’s text content production or editing so that it
contains keywords and phrases that came up in keyword analysis.
In search engine optimization the text content is the most important factor.
Content includes the headings, title tag, body copy, image tags and links. Web
page should contain most important keywords as naturally as possible. Content
should primarily offer information that is interesting for the visitor. In recent
years the blogs have become common way to generate lots of fresh content to
site regularly. (Reponen, 2009.)
According to Paananen, studies show that people do not see information in
Internet as relevant as in some other sources. Text is read more by eyeing.
Reading of printed text is also 30 % faster than reading from the screen. By
adding keywords to the content, the text often becomes more compact and
interesting issues are easier to find.
5.6.1 Head Lines
The differences in search results format are mainly in lengths of title-element
and meta-description (Image 10). Title shouldn’t be more than 69 characters,
because search engines do not show any longer titles. Meta name “description”
on the other hand can be 156 characters long. Meta keywords (that are not
displayed in search results) significance in optimization sense doesn’t make any
difference anymore. Nevertheless it is advisable to enter a couple of important
keywords also there.
The single most important variable in optimization is the title of document. It
shows in top of browser and in search engine result pages (Images 10 and 11).
The title is described with the HTML document element <title>, which is located
in the <head> section(Image 10). Title should describe the contents of the page
and it should contain keywords. (Reponen, 2009, Mäkelä, 2011.)
Description tag is a brief description on the site and it shows as a search result
description below the result link (Image 10). It is important to consider carefully
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the content of the description text. Attractive content gets users to click it more
often and even if it doesn’t raise search position in optimization sense, the good
description might attract more clicks. (Seppänen, 2011.)
<meta name>”description”
<title> Rudus content ”Rudus Oy on
kivipohjaisten…”
Image 10. Title tag & description
URL
Page title
H1 heading
H2 heading
Image 11. Headings, URL & Page Title
Page should always contain top head-element, <H1>, and if necessary sub
headings <H2> - <H6>. Headings affect search results when the searched
word is presented in heading. Top headings should coincide with the structure
content of the page and the irrelevant words shouldn’t be used in headings.
From search engine point of view it is most evident to present only one <H1>
heading. It is also logical that this heading is the top heading for the page’s text
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content. The page can contain several subheadings from same level. In Image
11 is presented top heading <H1> “Rakennebetonit” and sub heading <H2>
“Normaalisti kovettuva rakennebetoni (NO).
5.6.2 Body copy
When using HTML, the body copy is written inside the paragraph element (p-
element). Text content should be written grammatically correct and it should be
natural and addressed for the readers. Body text should contain ca. 200-300
words/page. The key phrase should be repeated at least 2-3 times. The
keyword should be reasonably presented throughout the text and if possible
with different inflections. However, the text should stay natural and keywords
shouldn’t be too over-emphasized. Keywords presented especially in the
beginning of the text are useful (Seppänen, 2011). Keywords can be
emphasized or in bold print in order to point them out for users. Search engines
are also taking this into account (Reponen, 2009). It is almost impossible to be
ranked to a high position in search results if the key phrase is not mentioned
once in the body of the text. In longer texts it is important to use also synonyms
to keywords as all users won’t necessarily use the most obvious or logical
search words. Every page should have unique text content in order to avoid
“double content” penalty from search engines.
The most important thing in the body is to check that execution follows
standards and that elements for HTML formatting are in use. Several sites’
technical implementers use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) classes to format
body copy, headings and necessary highlights. When using CSS the search
engine respected HTML-heading elements are not exploited and it is not
possible to reach for the best possible rating. This can be fixed by using HTML-
heading elements. Attention should also be paid to other page elements. Many
of them, such as image and link elements include heading and image definitions
helping the usability. If the Image is also a link in the site, navigation must use
the alt-attribute. Otherwise, the search robot cannot find it. (Paananen, 2006,
Seppänen, 2011.)
46
5.6.3 Links
In addition to site itself, search engines use also external factors when ranking
sites. One of the most important factors is links from external sites. In link
analysis the links to site are identified, new potential linkers named and site is
added to general and industry-specific directories. For external links there are
both free and paid Internet directory services available. External links can also
be acquired for example from the company’s partners. If it is possible the link
text should be a keyword rather than the company name. Different stakeholders
are valuable link sources. Only a few companies will link their customers,
subcontractors, etc. Websites, but normally when requesting the link has been
arranged. It is possible to proceed with the industry information sites and
discussion forums with the same way. Links from the pages with lot of users are
very important factor for the site’s visibility. It is also common to trade or buy
links from high PageRank pages. Generally speaking, the better it is the more
there are incoming links. On the other hand, it needs to be noted that links
shouldn’t come from wrong sites from the search engine point of view. These
sites are link farms and sites that are focused only for a link change. In addition
to external links there are also outgoing links and links to the sites own
subpages. (Paananen, 2006, Reponen, 2009.)
Leonhard Euler developed the graph theory in the late 1700s. In computer
science, a graph is an abstract data structure that is meant to implement the
graph and hypergraph concepts from mathematics. In graph theory, things are
described as nodes and routes between them creating a net as shown in image
12. (Hayes, 2000.)
Image 12. Graph theory (Wikipedia, 2011)
47
Net presentation’s advantage is that the network itself can be removed from the
content and view only the popularity. Several natural phenomenon, social
relations and Internet adhere to this theory. Internet is based on the so-called
scale-free network theory, where network is starting on one node and growing
without limits. In the 1900s, researches pointed out that it is the characteristic
for natural networks, like the Internet, to create links unevenly between nodes.
For example: many know who is the President of Finland, but only a few know a
concrete truck driver from Tornio. Links exponential distribution strengthens
when new nodes are created. When a baby learns to know new people, it is
more than likely that the baby probably learns to know the Finnish president
rather than a concrete truck driver from Tornio.
Therefore, the amount of links is growing exponentially in popular sites, and
unpopular ones won’t necessarily grow at all. In the end of last century
Altavista, Compaq and IBM extended the theory to the Internet and developed
so-called Bow-tie theory which divides Internet into the following four different
page types:
• Core sites: Key sites on the Internet. Sites that are strongly externally
linked and they are also linking to external sites.
• Origination sites: Sites that are linking to core sites, but core sites are not
linking back to them. Normally pages with poor quality or new sites that
haven’t yet risen to be a core site.
• Termination sites: High quality sites that contain lots of information and
services. For example the core sites directories are often linking to these
sites.
• Disconnected sites: Pages and sites that are not linking nor linked to
other pages. There are pages that are in purpose outside others, and
sites where Internet marketing has not been done.
48
Above mentioned sites linking to each other are presented in Image 13. Original
sites are link collections and individuals’ sites which are not linked from other
sites, but they provide links to other sites. Core sites are forming the centre and
they are both linking and to be linked with other sites. Termination sites are
large company sites and sites containing lots of information. They don’t
necessary need to link to the other sites to be popular. (Sherman, 2000,
Paananen, 2006.)
Disconnected sites
Origination Core sites Termination
sites sites
linking
Image 13. Internet pages divided into 4 pieces based on bow-tie theory
Some of the sites are disconnected sites that are not linked to other sites. From
SEO point of view it is important to realize the basics from network theory,
because the amount of links is almost directly proportional to visitor numbers.
When collecting the links it is important to remember that a single link from a
core site is more important than several from disconnected sites.
Over time, search engine companies have realized that if ranking is based on
page contents only, the system is vulnerable for abuses and search results can
be manipulated. Therefore search engines are indexing sites today also through
the external links and their quality. Search engines might also penalize sites if
they notice irregularities. For example in 2006 Google removed some Finnish
companies from its index because they had used the Finnish Webfinder.fi –
service that had tried to manipulate search results. (Hakukoneoptimointi.info,
2006.)
Google was presented for the first time in publication “The Anatomy of a Large-
Scale HypertextualWeb Search Engine”. The significance of that publication
49
was in the way the external links number was utilized. The criteria for the
classification were its independence from manipulation and its ability to point
out the most useful sites for majority. Similar methods had been used when
measuring publication dignity by counting the quotes to the publication. The
current classification methods are considerably more complex than the first
versions of Google and it has become very difficult to manipulate the current
results. In order to maintain their independence and efficiency, the search
engines don’t tell their ranking algorithms to the public. Some of the most
important factors affecting these algorithms have been resolved through
experience. Several search engines are able to combine the content to subject,
and to classify the link through content relevantly. Also the links from sites effect
ranking results. If the site has lots of links to high PageRank sites, it can be
respected as a high rank directory site respected among the users. The best
practice have proven to be honest actions plus good quality sites. That is a key
for incoming external links and moving towards the core sites group.
(Paananen, 2006.)
Internet directories or link directories are directories in the World Wide Web.
They are specialized in linking to other websites and categorizing those links.
Some say that they are precursors of the search engines, but actually they are
not search engines and do not display lists of web pages based on keywords.
The directory lists sites by category and subcategory. Although search engines
are handling many more sites, directories have maintained their share due to
high-quality links and easy usability. It is notable that directory users are
divided, just like search engine users. Some of the directories have focused
only on specific industries or countries while others are general directories.
There are both commercial and free directories. Free and ethically acting
directories are useful especially for new sites, even if they won’t bring much
new traffic to sites. Directories are highly valued in search engine indexes and
links from them increases also the target site’s ranking. (Wikipedia, 2011,
Paananen, 2006.)
It is difficult to determine how much ranking increases from linking, but
indicative results can be found by clarifying the following aspects:
50
• Are the links direct? If the links go through a commercial server or have
been carried out with script language, the classification is not growing.
• Is the directory’s site handling your topics and are you able to decide the
ad text?
• How many links are there in the site? The more there are links the less
the classification rises in PageRank.
• Who is linking to the directory and what is the classification of the
directory.
When starting the linking process or choosing partners for SEO it is good to
remember that experience is especially important when collecting links. After
several SEO processes, the optimizer has accumulated an extensive list of
various potential linkers. He probably knows the public directories and knows
which paid services are worth the money.
Image 14. Site links in www.rudus.fi
51
The idea behind internal links is to assist site visitors when moving in site and to
keep them longer in sites. Keywords should be taken into consideration when
Internal link anchor texts are chosen. A good way to start is to put all links in a
separate section in the footer, for example at the bottom of a page.
Google analyzes the link structure of the site and displays the titles as a site
links list, as presented in Image 14. Site links are displayed with search results
only if they are expected to be useful for users. Google displays up to 12 site
links per site. The links are not displayed if the site structure doesn’t allow
indexing algorithms to find good internal links or they don’t match relevantly to
the search. The site’s Webmaster can also remove site links with Webmaster
tools. The value of link is affected by the anchor text, text content surrounding
the link and the topic of the linking site. Link, officially called hyperlink, consists
of the address and text that describes the link, also called anchor text:<a href
=”http://www.rudus.fi”>Rudus/>. Search engines are using the anchor text to
determine the content of the target site. For example, if thousands of linkers
would link to Rudus’ Websites as following “ <a href=”http://www.rudus.fi”>
Good Service</a>, search engines would value the address http://www.rudus.fi
also to good positions when searchers are searching with “good service”, even
though the site itself wouldn’t include that phrase once. (Reponen, 2009.)
Google measures the value of links by its PageRank algorithm which has also
been discussed in paragraph 5.1. Basic idea of the algorithm is to describe
using a numeric value on a scale from 0-10 the vote result the site is getting
from other sites. The average value for sites is between 3 and 5. PageRank
value increases in proportion with the significance of the linking pages. The
biggest PageRank value is normally in the site’s front page where most of
external links are linking. Increases and decreases of the PageRank values are
updated once a month and the values can be monitored with the Google
Toolbar-application. For example, Rudus’ front pages’ PageRank is 6 (Google,
2011, Reponen, 2009.)
PageRank value inheritance can be prevented by giving the command
“nofollow” for the anchor element attribute that describes the link. For example:
52
<a href= ”http://www.rudus.fi”rel=”nofollow”>Rudus</a>. In this case, the search
robots are following this link, but the PageRank value is not inherited from the
site. Studies have shown it is likely that Google’s robot Googlebot follows
nofollow link, but does not save it to the index, unless the destination page has
already been indexed. (Reponen, 2009.)
5.7 Indexing
In SEO language Indexing means the site’s addition to search engine indexes,
or site notification for search engines. Even if the site is optimized well, the
whole work is in vain if the site cannot be found from search engine indexes.
When the new site is opened to the Internet it might take a long while before the
site can be found from search engines. However, the indexing process can be
accelerated by informing the search engines about the site. Before informing, it
is wise to check if the site can already be found from search engines, for
example by searching with the site name. Depending on the implementation,
however, it is possible the site cannot be found with the company name nor
product names even if it would have been indexed. If the site is not found the
indexing can be checked with the “site”-function in search engines. By
searching with the search phrase site: www:rudus:fi, the search engine is
searching information only from the address www.rudus.fi. If the site cannot be
found with this function it is likely that the site is not indexed. In these cases it is
wise to add sites with search engines indexing services that can be found from
search engine home sites. Google’s indexing requests can be sent to:
http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
Adding services do not automatically index the site, but they add sites to search
robot’s browsing queues. This is the practice how robots can get to sites with no
external linking. Afterwards, the site is set to queue the indexing process and
can be monitored with server log info. If the search robot visits the site, it can be
found from the user-agent field.
Search robots are programs that go through the Internet’s graphic structure
page by page. Their target is to go through as large part of the Internet pages
53
as possible and to enter copies of those to a database engine that generates an
optimized local copy of the page to match the searches. The optimal target is
that the robot gets instructions to find the first page and after that it follows the
internal and external links and moves forward until it has downloaded the whole
site. Problems might occur in page code interpretation, timeliness of
information, handling of the server load and malicious intents against robots.
Search robots are playing an important role when measuring the effectiveness
of the search engines. Accurate information of search engine activities is hard
to find due to strict confidentiality policies of the companies. Simplified structure
of the Robots activities is presented in Image 15. This model is based on
Paananen’s presented model in his Master’s thesis “Hakukoneoptimointi
Internetmarkkinoinnin tukena, 2006”. Basically the robot has a list of URL:s that
it needs to read through. It goes through the addresses in the list by
downloading and interpreting them. The content is sent for search engine
databases and the new links are added to a URL-list.
In the first part a list of Web addresses in
URL-mode is maintained (Unified Resource
Locator). The engine lists the addresses Read URL-list
where the search robot moves next. URL list
is also responsible to keep track of pages that
Contact address
have already been visited, when they were from the URL-list
visited last time, and do they need to be
revisited. Download page
It is practically impossible to index the entire Interpret the content
Internet due its size and fragmentation. This
is why the right indexing strategy has a huge
Add pages links
impact on search results quality and to the URL-list
reliability.
Image 15. Simplified Robot’s
functions. (Paananen, 2006)
54
In phase 2, the robot picks a page from URL-list and then downloads it. Aspects
that need to be taken into consideration are: robots exclusion protocol
compliance, load peaks avoidance and the optimization of DNS (Domain name
system). In the mid 90’s robots weren’t that welcome to all servers. They
caused lot of extra load, disrupted the votes and were repeatedly searching for
the same files. Currently robots are more intelligent, but still some pages are not
welcoming them. The remedy for this problem is the robots exclusion protocol,
which has been carried out with a robots.txt.file. (Paananen, 2006.)
Another important part of the search engines from the SEO point of view is the
processing of the indexed information. The process of searches can be divided
into three main phases (Image 16). In the first phase the search engine
analyses used keywords and searches for the corresponding pages. When the
pages are found they will be ranked and organized. In the last phase the results
are displayed in ranked order.
Analysis of
the inquiry
Search
terms input
information Result search
flow in
The results search
are presented
Ranking of
the results
Image 16. Information flow in search process (Paananen, 2006)
The used search bar is called an inquiry at this point. For example, if the user
writes to Google search bar “order and delivery”, the line “order and delivery” is
used in the inquiry. When analyzing the search it will be broken down to
individual words or search terms. After that the search engine looks for
55
information containing searched phrases. Hence, search engine would most
probably look for information with phrases “order delivery” and “delivery order”.
After the search the search engine performs the ranking. To ensure the
reliability of the results and making the manipulating more difficult, the search
engine companies are not giving out any precise information about this phase.
Some of the affecting variables are presented in chapter 5.1. (Paananen, 2006.)
If the site has existed for a longer time, it is likely that most common search
engines have already indexed the site. If not, the reason may be that the search
robot cannot move in or find the site content. It is also possible that the search
engine has for some reason banned the site. If the site is banned, there is, or
has been in the past, some unethical optimization techniques in use. Site won’t
be banned easily and it requires frequent and ongoing abuse. The use of
unethical methods leads to punishment before the complete removal from the
index (See Chapter.5.6.3 “Links”). It is also good to follow site indexing as part
of the SEO-process. If possible irregularities occur in the site, the information of
those comes fast enough to make changes without penalties or banning. There
are several methods that are classified as abuses and those are developing as
the search engines develop. The most common ones are cloaking, hidden
content, hidden links and spamming to blogs and quest books.
In the longer term, the best results are achieved by implementing the site’s
customer friendliness and honesty. Search engines also give instructions that
keep sites away from banned lists by guiding optimization techniques that are
not against the search engine code of practice. Google’s guidelines are
available at:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/topic.py?topic=28800
If the page cannot be found from the index, the most common reason is that
robot’s cannot move freely in the page. When new sites are created, there will
be no problems if SEO technical rules are followed. In the older pages
problems might occur for several reasons. For example:
56
• There might be robot visits preventing “.robots.txt” still active or the
search engine has given up indexing the site if it has been prevented in
the past
• “Robot traps” or links implementation with JavaScript code
• PopUp windows, frames etc.
• Long parameter queues in links caused by publication systems
• Non valid code
• HTTP Cookies enforcing
It is also good to ensure that access from the main page to every single sub-
page is simple by following the links. Page maps improve both usability and
indexing.
5.8 Follow-Up
To ensure the development there needs to be set metrics for follow up. There
are useful visitor monitoring software to track site usage. These tools are
presented in paragraph 5.3., ”Consumer behaviour”.
There needs to be continuous Website visitor and target analysis to reach the
objectives. Website visitors and objectives make no difference to other
company key figure measuring protocols. Like company’s key figures
measuring develops the business, Website analysis can help developing these
activities.
Website analytic tools were presented on page 35. Tools are easy to use and
they give valuable information to develop Websites. The follow up and
development should support the conversion of the site. For example in Rudus’
sites the conversion i.e. target is to get potential customers to proceed to the
“contact” section. There are also other important key performance indicators
that should be examined. Those could be the bounce rate, time spent on site,
entry methods, share of consumer visitors, etc
57
6 EVALUATION
This thesis work does not include the actual research part.
The research question in this study was to find out is there a correlation
between consumer sales and search engine optimization. The answer to this
question was found. Even though the answer is exact, it should be perceived as
an illustrative guideline because the reasoning process includes many
assumptions.
Due to the case company’s needs it was essential to include into the survey
also the site’s technical evaluation and e-marketing processes functioning in
Rudus. SEO and SEM parts are well handled in both theory and research part.
But there are still lot of e-marketing activities that need more precise
examination.
The most difficult part of the study was to limit it somehow. On the other hand it
would have been easier to limit the study strictly to SEO, but eventually that
would have not given enough answers for Rudus to reorganize their e-
marketing.
58
7 SUMMARY
In the theory part of this study, the importance of Internet and e-commercial
activities were pointed out with statistics. Search engine marketing and search
engine optimization were presented and also consumer behaviour in search
engines was clarified. All these topics were handled with supporting statistics.
Theory part is a useful tool for everyone participating in the SEO process in
organizations. The technical part of optimization is not handled in a detailed
manner, because this is a business administration related master’s thesis.
The research part was made for case company Rudus Ltd. Research was made
by collecting the needed results from various sources. There was a survey
period in Rudus’ Website and consumer sales between April 1st 2011 and
December 31st 2011. This period was compared to situation between April 1st
2010 and December 31st 2011. There were no other significant changes in
consumer sales practices between 2010 and 2011. This is one important factor
when judging the relevance of the correlation.
This study was instructive and interesting for its author.
59
CHARTS
Chart 1. Number of hostnames in the Internet in 1996 -2010, p.13
Chart 2. Internet usage in different age groups in Finland, p.14
Chart 3. Comparative research of leads from advertisement in different
medias, p.14
Chart 4. Use of Information Technology in Finnish companies in 2010, p.15
Chart 5. Homepage use in Finnish companies in 2010, p.16
Chart 6. Digital marketing budget from total marketing budget, p.17
Chart 7. Internet Marketing, p.20
Chart 8. How actively companies use digital Marketing channels? p.20
Chart 9. Is Digital Marketing spend budgeted? p.21
Chart 10. Component’s of Google’s ranking algorithm, p.27
Chart 11. Percent of traffic by Google result, p.33
Chart 12. Optimization process, p.37
Chart 13. U.S. keyword breakdown by percentage of clicks, p.41
Chart 14. Conversion Rate by keyword phrase length, p.41
IMAGES
Image 1. Paid and organic results in search engine, p.22
Image 2. PageRank, The bigger the ball the better the rank, p.26
Image 3. Eye tracking comparison from consumers behavior in 2005 and
2008, p.33
Image 4. Ad clicking popularity vs. organic search results, p.34
Image 5. Eye scanning, ad vs. organic results, p.34
Image 6. Popularity of other search relating media, p.35
Image 7. Optimization process inputs distribution, p.38
Image 8. Long tail SEO, p.40
Image 9. Search engine friendly site address, p.43
Image 10. Title tag & description, p.45
Image 11. Headings, URL & Page Title, p.45
Image 12. Graph theory, p.47
Image 13. Internet pages divided into 4 pieces based to bow-tie theory, p.49
Image 14. Site links in www.rudus.fi, p.51
Image 15. Simplified Robot’s functions, p.54
Image 16. Information flow in search process, p.55
FORMULAS
Formula 1. Conversion rate, p. 41
60
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kehittäminen. Laurea, Leppävaara.
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62
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